


not even you could destroy your shine

by jeannedarc



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Body Horror, Body Worship, Curses, DAY 5: Supernatural, Depression, Drinking, Emotional Baggage, Gods, Inspired by Midas and the Golden Touch (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Isolation, M/M, Sneaking Around, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, curse as metaphor, hurting people you love, mentions of the mile high club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:08:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22445347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: Kun closed his eyes and prayed for something exciting to happen to him. Anything.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Qian Kun, background johnwoo
Comments: 14
Kudos: 53
Collections: In Every Lifetime: A KunTen Fan Week





	not even you could destroy your shine

**Author's Note:**

> day 5: supernatural.
> 
> as always, mind the tags and take good care of yourself.
> 
> thanks to elle who let me cry about this while i wrote it.  
> thanks to the crying discord who encouraged me even when i felt like i was literal seconds away from deleting this.  
> thanks to everyone who sat through me just being irritatingly self-absorbed while i got the whole thing finished.

Every night, Kun fell asleep wishing, with hope that had abandoned even itself, that something in his life could glimmer and shine, the way the world around him seemed to. Perhaps, looking back, that had been his first mistake: his father had always taught him the disingenuity of wanting more than life offered, the importance of humility and knowing one’s own station, the beauty that could be found in simple acts of gratitude.

Kun found that gratitude in the little things he had the opportunity to do each day. His work, after all, was filled with chances to mess up and accidentally waste an absurd amount of someone else’s money. Today was one such day: in which he had the integral part to a repair between his hands, and it had simply collapsed beneath his touch. He stared at it, blankly at first, and then with a mounting panic.

At least he’d been quick to act, to ask for help even though it killed him to do so, particularly when his coworkers crowded around him to offer suggestions. 

His fellow mechanics comforted him, and in the end things were alright -- in their estimation, anyhow, not that he took much comfort in it. He still found his gratitude, his father’s voice ringing in his ears, the memory aged to sepia but no less important.

Today had, by all accounts, been exciting, if only judging by the tizzy of people who’d surrounded him in an attempt to help him solve his problem, their noise still ringing in his ears long after they’d departed, made their individual ways to the timeclock now their day was over. Still, he’d been bored. Exhausted, really, of a objects that rejected him, and people that only acknowledged him when he needed assistance of some kind. 

And so: Kun wanted. Kun’s edges coveted what his spirit should have already had, the things he found beautiful in others but found himself lacking.

He clocked out hours later, much to his own chagrin.

That was his own fault. A humble existence made for a dull day-to-day. By the time he finished his work at the airport his hands were spotted with grease, his clothes flecked with burns from soldering together parts in an attempt to make things work again, he was not only bored, but exhausted by the notion that he would have to make some sort of effort to make his day better. Pride choked that out fairly quickly, much to his dismay. Admittedly, this was not how he’d seen his life going as a starry-eyed child with the world ahead of him, a crystal ball that foretold a great future. He’d seen himself piloting, not repairing, and though he’s happy to have the chance to be near these winged machinations, behold the majesty of human creation, he would do anything to make the smaller, more naïve version of himself satisfied.

He wondered, from time to time, whether or not anyone would feel the same about their own childhood iterations, but dismissed those as idle fantasy.

By the time he finished his work nightly, the hangar was empty, a ghost town, bereft of any sign that anyone had been there since himself. In spite of himself, Kun admired the efficiency with which his coworkers did their job, and coveted that same ability for his own. In much the same way he envied their afterimages when they were long gone. He wondered about their families, about their loved ones, about the things they did after going home from a long day at the hangar.

His eyes, he’d found, had turned so green lately that he was starting to hate everyone at his side, through no fault of their own. It was silly, and he knew it, but as he dragged his feet to the parking lot where his car sat abandoned, he couldn’t help but wonder if anyone wondered about him. If his coworkers thought about what he did after work the way he did about them.

He did not often have time for his own needs, being dedicated first to his work and second to himself. Most nights he went straight home, the drive between work and house long enough that he was often anxious at the prospect of falling asleep. He listened to audiobooks, exposés on activists stealing money from their donators and historical tomes that would put to sleep even the most dedicated of scholars. He called friends, the few he truly called friends, a weakling’s attempt to keep himself awake. In the times during which he was at his feeblest, Kun would just call a cab, fall asleep in a stranger’s backseat despite the warnings he’d been given against doing such a thing.

Sometimes, though, he ended up at the airport bar, because no one could tell him otherwise when he had clearance. He’d sit alongside the pilots and admire their gold lapel pins, the way they glinted in the low light. Any attempt at conversation was a feeble one at best, not because he thought himself better or worse than them but rather because he was simply so _tired_ that the act of socialisation pained him.

Kun reached his car, caught the sadness in his gaze at his own reflection, and realised that he did not want to leave. Not just yet. So he caught a ride with security, a golf cart clanging along the passageways meant for human feet rather than landing gear. His company was a couple rowdy guards looking for some fun during the late nights when the flights were a bit more scarce.

He did not, at least, envy them -- they had to make their own fun, and their shifts had just started. Kun, by contrast, was free.

Still, as he was riding on the back of a golf cart, Kun closed his eyes and prayed for something exciting to happen to him. Anything.

All at once he knew where he was going, and that he would end up at the bar, mingling with the pilots who he thought might know his name. 

When he entered the bar on any other night, its smoke-filled air made his visage a touch hazier than the tiredness creeping into his marrow might account for. They smiled politely anyway, did not permit him to drink alone. They clapped him on the back, they sang along with the early 2000s pop songs that played low over the speakers, they asked him how his day had been and whether or not he’d meant to come in tonight. 

Perhaps some of them had called him friend, when he was not present to take the compliment. He did not know and, upon meeting them, found caring too difficult to fathom, but his heart grew warm at the prospect.

Tonight, though, his regular crowd, a rowdy group of slightly younger men who’d managed to earn their wings through nepotism or far too many years of hard work, has not gathered. He wondered at the miracle of an entire handful of people managing the same day off, different airlines notwithstanding, and sat at the bar, alone, aware of how pathetic he must have seemed to whatever stranger was looking on.

From down the way, someone caught his eye with an immediacy that startled him. Kun, upon taking in the catlike eyes, the careful posturing, the casual air of someone who was clearly a traveler, was reminded of the envy he’d carried with him so long it had become a barbell across his shoulders. It forced his posture to draw closer to dirt, to the humility he’d so often yearned to be able to have. Still, he stared, bright-eyed and hopeful, because the man in question was staring back, a curl adorning his mouth, like he knew some sort of secret that Kun would kill to learn.

The stranger, for the record, was not wrong, but it turned out he did not have to kill at all. Funny how those things work out. 

They stared at one another a long while, if only because neither of them seemed to have the energy to make the approach. Kun finished one whiskey, then started another, gently swirling the glass between his hand as he tried to think of words adequate enough to seduce such a creature. Already he was thinking of what it might take to convince him to fuck in an airplane -- an empty one, one not quite ready to take once again to the sky--

“I’m Ten,” called the stranger from across the bar, disrupting the silence between them. His accent was so lush, his vowels so wrong and his consonants so touching that Kun considered vacationing in it, silly as it sounded.

“Kun,” he agreed with a nod, sliding the five seats down the bar to sit just beside Ten. They sat elbow-to-elbow, and Kun relished in the touch, the contact from a human that did not have to speak with him out of some strange workplace obligation that otherwise might bind together strangers who might not normally mix. “What are you having?” So, too, did their knees brush against one another. It sent a thrill up the column of Kun’s spine. 

Ten flashed a grin, and God, but he was the most intense thing Kun had seen in such a long time. Was it obvious, he wondered, that he was starved for casual contact? If it was, Ten did not acknowledge it, instead waggled his glass in Kun’s direction. “Soda,” he said, with all the scandal that a much younger man might feel were he doing something he truly shouldn’t be. “I’m leaving in a couple hours. I’d rather be drinking wine, though.”

There was so much mystery in even a few words that Kun wanted to lap them up, a kitten at its bowl. He’d never felt so small in such a presence before -- not even around those he despised, for birth, for occupation. He breathed in the woodsy scent of Ten just a couple inches too far away, and sipped his whiskey, and let it burn down his throat the way a match lit to guide the darkness inside him might. “Where are you going?” he asked, when he’d regained his footing, his ability to converse like a normal human being, as opposed to some jealous cretin who wished he could accompany a stranger elsewhere.

“Dubai,” Ten singsonged, tipping back the dregs of his soda. Even the way his ice clinked in his glass was something delicately elegant. 

Kun could not help but admire him, covet him, the way his fingers delicately cradled his glass, lifted it to his lips, the subtle bob of his throat when he swallowed. All at once he was knocked down with the urge to taste the salt of Ten’s skin. “Why are you going to Dubai?” he asked, rather than entertaining those ideas. Something told him Ten would acquiesce.

“Big party,” said Ten with the sarcasm that the air around him afforded him. Then he snorted into his soda, rolling his eyes. “Medical conference. I’m a translator. I work with a famous doctor who speaks all around the world. I’m basically just following him around until he gets tired of speaking.”

“Does he get tired of speaking?” Kun couldn’t help that curiosity. The bar around him had faded to nothing, an empty facsimile of a place, its coding all jumbled and ugly. 

Ten’s eyes flashed with something almost identifiable -- as if Ten had the same issues with envy that Kun did. “He likes his own voice too much,” he replied, airy. “What are _you_ drinking? The next one’s on me.”

And Kun, alight with promise and gleaming gold, lifted his head, met Ten’s eye. “Whatever you think I should have,” he said.

///

In the middle of the night, Kun’s friends were rarely up to answer his calls. Tonight, though, was a blessing: from the back of a cab he dialed Johnny, who answered immediately, as if having waited for the call. It had been Johnny’s gift, once upon a time, to know precisely when a friend needed him, though it had dulled with marriage.

When he answered Kun could hear grumbling in the background. Johnny’s husband, probably awoken by the sharp ringing of a cell phone. Kun was sorry, almost, except he was drunk, too, and that took all the sorry right out of him. “Good morning,” Johnny mumbled, and Kun could see him so clearly now, his cupped hand over the receiver while he shushed Jungwoo back to sleep. “Or good evening? It’s 3am, Kun, is everything okay?”

Even now, Johnny’s voice was a comfort, his presence a weight that kept Kun from drifting away. “I met someone,” he burbled, uselessly. “At the bar.”

Johnny rumbled with a good-natured laugh, staticky and distant through the connection, tenuous as it tethered them together. “I’m happy for you. Are you okay, though? You aren’t driving, are you?”

“No, m’in a cab,” Kun agreed. “Car’s back at work, I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Tell me who you met,” Johnny implores, and there’s noise in the background, significant of Johnny’s habit of taking calls outside rather than keeping them in the bedroom. Kun can see this, too, the abandoned patio, stacked high with empty longnecks that Johnny forgot to take in after a long conversation. “What were they like?”

“He was…” And here, Kun struggled for the words, because how could any language encapsulate what Ten was, truly, at his core? Kun, believing he had seen Ten for who he truly was, stumbled a few times. “Unreal.”

Johnny laughed again, his voice scratching with the sleep Kun had stolen from him. A click in the background told Kun he’d picked up smoking again. “You didn’t meet him on the internet, did you?” he teased, the wind whistling around their call.

Kun scoffed, leaned against the door, his seatbelt digging in to his hip uncomfortably with him doing nothing to rectify the situation. “I’m not you, Johnny, or Jungwoo for that matter,” he pronounced, surprisingly clear considering his slur from a moment prior. “Not that I’m not happy. When’s your anniversary?”

“Next week,” answered Johnny, in a tone that betrayed the awe he must have felt at Kun’s ability to remember. “You know everything, don’t you.”

And Kun just laughed and laughed. “If I knew everything, why would I call you to ask what to do about the man I met?” He paused, then, thinking about what he even _could_ do. It wasn’t as if he would see Ten again anytime soon, his schedule being what it was and Kun’s calendar full of nights upon nights of self-pity and jealousy and self-loathing.

“Kun,” Johnny said, cutting through his thoughts, a siren on a dark night. Kun lifted his head, peered out the window, expecting to see flashing lights coming their way. “You’d be fine, you know. If you wanted to try again. Someone will see you for what you’re worth.”

And that, at least, was a comfort, though not the one Kun made this call for. “How are you guys?” he asked, changing the subject, none too smoothly. At least he could count on his best friend to be talkative about himself, take the bait and offer distraction. “Tell Jungwoo I’m sorry for waking him up, would you?”

///

Kun was good at his job. Good enough for commendation, for promotions that left him nearly to the top of his floor work food chain within a couple years. Something like that didn’t happen too often, his superiors liked to remind him. His direct manager was in awe every time Kun came up with a creative solution to a problem that should have, by all accounts, been routine. Moreso when he managed to solve these problems with a smile, a grace that most mechanics found wanting. 

He was good. He was more than good. The exhaustion that had years ago become part of his very marrow attested to that.

Never once had Kun doubted his ability to get things done; it was, after all, the one thing at which he’d proven proficient over the years. Even as a child he’d managed to do the best in his class only because of his dedication to seeing things through to the end. His father had always praised him for that and, cautiously, reminded him that “finishing is more important than being the best”.

Even now Kun regretted allowing his father to goad him into mediocrity.

It was another day, another night, Kun holed up in the bar, tucked safely between his pilot friends. Yukhei, Kunhang and Sicheng looked amazing in their starched uniforms. Kun, for the record, was tapping away at a schematic on his phone, marking the things he’d have to do the next day.

Yukhei had been the one to pull him from his stupor with a clap on the shoulder. “Are you okay, ge?” he asked. Though it was clear he was _trying_ to be quiet and sensitive about it, he was also drunk, coloured up to the tips of his ears, sporting a goofy grin that made no logical sense in its brilliance. “You haven’t said two words all night.”

Kun tugged away from the weight of Yukhei’s massive hand. “Fine,” he answered, remembering his airs at the last second, when he saw his face reflected in the nameplate Yukhei still wore. “Just planning some things out for when I come back Monday.”

“You’re always working,” complained Kunhang, who was similarly bright in the face, wide in the eyes. Youth had taken mercy on him, something too for which Kun found resentment. “Are you too busy working to realise that guy’s been checking you out all night?” He gestured, with a point of his chin, toward the bar, a sacred site for Kun now. “Seriously. Like a wolf or something. He must think you’re hot, ge, I don’t know if you knew.”

Kun did know, but was not used to it being commented on so casually, and coloured, ducking his head behind the protection of his phone screen once again. He did not need the attention, not when he did not have it in himself to make conversation with anyone he did not already know. The hiding came too late; the two of them met eyes before Kun could get back to working.

The stranger at the bar raised an eyebrow, and grinned something sinister. Like he knew exactly what was happening in Kun’s head, and how to undo every knot he’d carefully tied to keep himself safe.

He pushed out of his seat, crossed the gap between them. The room was a chasm that Kun wished would open beneath him for the sole purpose of swallowing them both whole. He stood before the pilots’ table, and everyone present fell quiet, awe in their eyes.

Sicheng spoke up, the unwitting protector of Kun against drunken strangers with hands that dipped too far into his psyche. “What do you need?” If he sounded short, it was deserved; Sicheng was always kind to those deserving of kindness. Kun thanked whatever star had given Sicheng to him, a gift from some forgotten God the likes of which had been buried beneath the earth a dozen centuries. “We’re kind of busy.”

Kun wanted to stop Sicheng, if only because it wasn’t _that_ bad, even if he felt greasy and anxious under the stare of some man he'd never met. “It’s fine,” he whispered, but neither Sicheng nor the stranger seemed to hear him, staring each other in the eye as if some rivalry previously existed between them.

“I know who you are,” said the stranger as he turned to Kun, one perfect, poetic eyebrow raised, the scar down its middle making him seem even more intimidating. “Qian Kun. Mechanic. This place suits you. I was wondering if maybe we could talk.” He said it like it was a command rather than a question. Though there was infinite mystery in his beautiful eyes, Kun could not say that he was a fan of being told what to do.

Kun looked this man up and down, scrutinisng him the way he might one of his repair jobs upon first receiving it. It was without a second thought that he answered, with all the confidence his frame contained, “I don’t think I want to talk, unless it’s about how you know my name.”

The stranger, for all he was worth, dragged his hand through his hair, looked as if he might spit. Kun reared back a fraction, just enough that it was not subtle at all how anxious he was not to be in control of this situation. Then he laughed, head thrown back, red hair a perfect halo that Kun watched encircle him. “Why wouldn’t you want to talk to me?” asked the man, as if he knew how gorgeous he was, as if he was aware that even the scars that adorned his face were like gold leaf on an already perfect painting.

Beside him, Kun’s friends, his pilot compatriots, had fallen silent. Even Sicheng did not seem to know what to say, though he usually had the sharpest and most underhanded comments for everything. They, too, shrank beneath the weight of a stranger’s gaze, which swept over them carefully, sizing them up as a group and then each in turn.

Finding no contest, the man turned back to Kun, one hand tucked almost too neatly into the pocket of his blazer, a touch rumpled but in a way the layman would find _glamorous_. “You asked for excitement, didn’t you?” And Kun did not have time to ask how the stranger knew of his prayers, the words he’d spoken to something in which he didn’t believe, except in his heart of heart of hearts. “Do you get to choose how the excitement shows up in your life?” At this point the man had taken a seat, backwards, legs sprawled out -- long, enticing, considering how small he was, how imposing. It was as if some divine architect had cobbled him together out of all its best parts. “I’m just asking, do you want your prayers answered or not?”

And Kun would taste the words for a long time after tonight; for now, he merely spoke out of the side of his mouth: “I really don’t want to talk right now.”

The man’s eyes flickered with a flame that did not burn. He reached out to brush a fingertip along the back of Kun’s wrist, as if enticing him a final time. Kun curled up in the chair, fighting the sensation of withering that rushed through him all at once. “Fine, then,” he said, drawing back, disgust plain in the tight-lipped set of his mouth. “You were given your chance and spurned a gift.”

“Is this a little weird to you guys?” Kun heard Yukhei asking. Sicheng and Kunhang shushed him immediately, transfixed by the exchange even as they slackened their already loose ties, shrugged out of their starched jackets and cast them aside.

It was good, thought some distant part of Kun, that at least he had someone willing to fight for him.

Yukhei, the most imposing of the three of them, stood without the ceremony on which the other two plateaued, pressed himself chest-to-chest with the stranger. “Are we about to have a problem?” he asked, in his lowest rasp.

“Not at all,” sang the stranger, hand in his hair again. “I’ve done my part.”

And Kun watched the broad back retreating as the mystical stranger left the bar, his skin burning where he’d been touched. No one had thought to touch him so intimately in such a long time, save Ten, who was long gone by now.

Sicheng was the first to lean over to Kun, whisper in his ear: “Are you okay?”

But Kun could not answer; he was too focused on the phone in his hand, turned to solid gold, heavy upon his palm and displaying but a branded image of what had been his schematics for his next job.

///

Kun, good at interviews, and at keeping jobs for far longer than he was qualified for them, knew that his weakness was being unable to admit when he’d bitten off more than he could swallow. The nights before put far behind him -- at least in memory, though his second phone in as many days would attest to the fact that in practise, things were still going to shit -- Kun showed up to work, ready to get things done. His fingers were covered by thin latex gloves. Medical grade. They’d hold up to the work he was about to put them through.

To be fair, Kun didn’t want them fawning over him like they normally did whenever he did something wrong. But when, in the middle of winching shut two pieces of sheet metal, Kun tore open a fingertip on the glove, it was all anyone could do _not_ to wonder at the marvel of the plane slowly but steadily turning to gold. His coworkers crowded him, making it difficult for Kun to breathe. Only the nature of the curse kept them from putting their hands on him, shuffling him along to the beat of their surely concurrent thoughts: _This man is over._

Kun smiled grimly, because what else could he do? His backup career as it was had become a dream of the past, some fever he’d thought up as a child that he’d yet to completely forget.

Before he let himself get whisked away completely, Kun snatched a new pair of gloves. It was still better than the alternative.

The big boss called him into the office. Kun had never met the big boss, not even during the interviewing process. His gilded desk, hatted by a nameplate that read out the over three decades of service to the company, was enough to make even the most humble man nervous. Kun, for the record, asked for a glass of water from the secretary, and finished it before the man had finished his paperwork. It was the only thing he could do to quell the fire lit beneath him, and soothe the anxiety that burned down his throat.

“What happened down there?” asked the big boss, as if it were a secondhand thought. Kun was there, lips damp with his second glass. “That’s a billion dollar plane that got turned to gold.”

And Kun couldn’t lie. It didn’t even occur to him that this was an option, struck down by humiliation as he was. He finished his glass of water, and explained the curse, leaving out the part where it had happened on airport property and nothing else. When finished his words hung in the air, weighing down the usually ramrod straight line of Kun’s shoulders.

“So you made a billion dollar paperweight,” said the big boss, buzzing in the secretary and asking for a drink of his own. The secretary brought him scotch on the rocks, and Kun didn’t think getting fired was an appropriate time in which he’d be able to question standards and practises at his place of business, but he wanted so badly to ask anyway.

Instead he sat on his hands, wishing to tear a hole into his protection, that his statue would have to answer the line of inquiry sure to come at him.

Kun glanced around nervously, observing the seemingly myriad books, papers, _awards_. He had always been excellence, but never been surrounded by it.

“What are you going to do about it?” asked Kun’s boss, lifting a brow over the rim of his glass, and for a moment the gesture was so subtle, yet so stark, that it took Kun’s breath away. “What? Don’t act like you don’t know curses are reversible. It’s all the rage these days. People changing their lives for the better of those around them.”

Kun, for the record, did not think anyone the worse for him being able to essentially pull money from thin air. Then, he thought of all the flights that would not be flown due to his carelessness, and quickly reconsidered. “I don’t know yet, sir,” he explains with the patience of someone pleading their case before a judge. “I haven’t decided.”

The boss sipped his drink. “Well, in case you don’t know, we have a wonderful medical leave program.”

Kun is not too thick to take the hint. He is, however, too stubborn. “I think I would rather do admin work than--”

“Than go get a fixable problem fixed?” His boss then leaned forward onto his elbows, and the drink on his breath was stronger than just the one sitting in front of him. “I don’t know about that. You’ve already caused a problem that we can’t do anything about. It’s either this or the company sues you for damages. Can you afford that?”

This sense of mortification, Kun noted, felt worse than the curse itself. He gathered his thoughts, and thanked his employer for the opportunity. He tugged at the edge of his gloves, making sure they were secure in case he accidentally touched the secretary’s desk or, worse yet, the secretary herself on the way out.

///

It was two in the morning when reality set in, when Kun realised that his boss was right. He couldn't do this without medical intervention. He stumbled down to his single-car garage, the sobs still caught in his throat. Grief, he had learned since trying to go to sleep earlier that evening, was something that hit all at the same time, rather than in increments, as popular belief would lead him to understand. Grief was something that rammed into him like... well, like a curse from a stranger, a god in human skin, trying to deliver something that Kun had neglected to take with a grateful heart.

He still remembered that face, as he fell into the driver's seat of his car, as it filled up his vision the way the fog of his breath filled up the windshield. He couldn't see. Didn't want to see.

Between his palms and the steering wheel the grocery bags he'd taped to his hands crinkled, and the noise brought him back to reality. The hospital. He needed to see a doctor yesterday.

When he made it there, they treated him like a hypochondriac, even when the pen he used to sign the legal forms turned to gold beneath his frustrated touch. "Are you sure this isn't just...something you've always done?" asked the nurse in triage, tipping her head to one side. A shame he'd have to hate her, too; she was cute, and kind to everyone else, but the tiredness in her eyes told another story.

He gritted his teeth and kept filling out the medical history, like it made a difference in how they'd treat him. Those with curses, he knew, were all the same, in the eyes of so many people who could help but chose not to.

The nurse who took him back to the exam room looked at him with sympathy which, he decided in a flash, he hated even worse. He did not need pity -- he needed _help_. The crush around his lungs threatening to stop him breathing where he sat. He held up one hand, still covered in plastic. "I need another one of these," he said, slowly, like he was explaining to a child. "Do you have something? Can I have one of the sterile gloves?"

She frowned, wrinkles round her eyes. Old enough to be Kun's mother. Unforgiving in the exact same way. "Do you have someone you can call?" she asked, and he knew that this meant he was not leaving any time soon.

He called Johnny, hands shaking under the weight of their own burden. Johnny, who always answered no matter what time of day it was. Johnny, who was his best friend. One of his only friends. He'd never felt quite this isolated from the world before.

Beneath him, the exam table started turning, too, and Kun panicked for a long while before realising it was just the paper. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

Grief, he realised, was not something that made logical sense. He waited for Johnny to come after just a brief explanation, with only the barest shine of hope to his name, sustaining him but only barely.

In the end, it was Jungwoo in the hospital room, not Johnny, who was asleep in the car, according to his husband. “Sorry. I tried to wake him up.” At least Jungwoo did not look upon him with the false empathy everyone else seemed to want to lend him. “He’s in the car. Are...are you okay?”

Kun held up his gloved hands, a scowl painting his mouth all the way across. “I’ll be fine,” he said, too readily. “Just...can I please stay with the two of you tonight?”

And though the comforting smile did not reach his eyes, Jungwoo told him, “Of course.” Like he hadn’t known Kun for half their lifetimes, like he was somehow not the friend that had set Jungwoo up with the love of his life (to hear him tell it). 

Like he was different.

///

At first, without work, he found that he could not find anything to occupy all those hours of the day that had been happily taken from him. He sat around his house, trying his best not to affect change upon anything that belonged to him. But eventually that led to a special sort of insanity, the one that had him gloved as he showered so that his hands were never truly clean. In truth: not touching things was alien, to him. He was, after all, so used to the way things felt beneath his work-rough fingertips, the textures of things, that eventually he gave up the farce.

After a day, his couch that almost never got used was gold, as was the bookshelf, which he’d carefully and methodically divested of its treasures so that they did not go, too. He thought it might be funny to ruin things in the bathroom, but then realised the cost of replacement or repair would not be covered by the weight of the things he created.

Then he went outside.

The sunshine, bitter cold as it was, felt good on his face. He tipped his head back to greet it, and the wind plucked its fingers through his hair, and he was _alive_ in a way that he could not fathom.

It only lasted a minute, of course, because life happens in increments, and because he caught a butterfly on his bare finger. It clanged to the ground within a few seconds. He stared at it, its wing so fine that it snapped off upon collision.

And then, sobbing softly, Kun sank to his knees. He turned his teary eyes to the sky, and asked whatever was up there whether or not it could have some mercy on him.

The sky, as it was wont to do, did not reply.

///

In time, Kun became a ghost. He had haunts, as ghosts did. He haunted the airport most of all, his sense of purpose lost entirely. The bar was different now. The pilots that had watched him receive the worst punishment he could have, looking at him with the same pity offered him by medical professionals and his coworkers. They clapped him on the shoulder, still, but carefully, lest he be contagious or, worse yet, decide to curse them for witnessing but doing nothing.

He had never wished harder for anything than he did for things to go back to normal -- but then, that wasn't the way curses worked.

The next time Ten saw him, Kun was wearing work gloves. It was an easy thing to make excuses for, thought Kun -- he worked with his hands, which often were at risk for injury. He did not feel embarrassed about it, though the looks on his friends’ and coworkers’ faces said that he should. The questioning look Ten gave him when he took his seat in the booth opposite the bar was more than enough for him to be able to know he wouldn't lie, were he asked. Ten, after all, was something else. He did not deserve half-truths, or Kun avoiding the situation entirely. He deserved the gold idols Kun was sure to create sometime in the future, once boredom had driven him from sense.

Now, though, Kun found himself anxious about the last time he’d seen Ten, about the potential for an incident that he would not be able to fix. He had sorely missed the contact between the pair of them which was, he knew, illogical. A craving he could never truly satisfy, even though he’d spent a bit of their few weeks apart wondering what it might like to feel every inch of Ten’s skin beneath his hands.

When they met, they spent far too long pretending to try and make one another nervous by making eye contact. Ten’s sleepy eyes stirred something in Kun’s heart that he had thought to be dead, killed by his own humility, like him as it was. They played at being strangers for the better part of half an hour, despite the feeling that Kun had which told him he knew Ten better than he knew some people he had for years.

The first thing Ten asked of Kun was, of course, about the gloves themselves; he eyed them with suspicion as Kun took his seat, careful that their elbows did not touch, afraid that the instructions he’d been given would turn out to be untrue. “Did you hurt yourself working?” His eyes only met Kun’s at the last second, and Kun tried to believe he did not imagine the concern in them.

Kun frowned, shook his head, trying to dissuade the worry, chagrined at his inability to take it away entirely. “I’ve been cursed,” he murmured, a bit beleaguered by the notion as he’s served his drink. He could barely feel the glass through the hide around his fingertips; when he swirled his glass, he caught a drop in his eye, and it spiderwebbed his eyelashes to the point he had to take a minute, adjust his vision with the back of his leathered hand. “I’ve got to wear these all the time now. At least, that’s what the doctor and the psychiatrist said.”

“Psychiatrist,” said Ten, turning the word over on the tip of his tongue repeatedly, soundlessly. “You think you might be crazy, then?”

“No,” answered Kun with a swiftness. “I know curses are real. That’s just… what they recommend, when something like this happens to someone." He paused, took a dainty sip. "I was trying to do what was recommended, since I didn't know what else to do.”

Ten seemed to turn this over, too, but his lips remained still. “It’s a shame,” he pronounced at last. “I was excited to see you.” There was that twinkle of mischief in him once again, significant of thinking something wicked -- or at least Kun presumed, having met Ten once. “We can just talk, though, if you really want.”

And selfish though it may have been, Kun certainly did. He remembered the stricken look on Johnny’s face, when Jungwoo had helped Kun out to the ER parking lot; his friend did not know much of curses, much in the way that someone who didn’t study them knew little of birds native to Madagascar, and there was a fear in him that had not existed before. It settled over the car ride home, a fog in the streets of a town neither of them occupied, but rather passed through for the night. 

He took a deep breath, and prayed he might say the right thing. “I feel like… like everyone is going to treat me differently now. And I really don’t want that, because it’s hard enough to talk to people as it is.”

Ten regarded him with a look that was beyond deciphering. Not pity. Not sorrow. Just speculation. Kun didn’t know he’d ever been quite so grateful as that moment.

The bartender dropped by for a moment, refilled Ten’s glass. He wasn’t drinking soda tonight and Kun, bewitched, took a sniff at his drink, then a taste. It was, he supposed, the closest he’d get to kissing tonight. Not that he’d practised. Not that he’d tried to ask. His lips might not have carried the curse, lest his words turn someone immobile, his curses fall on some object that couldn’t afford to be so heavy with someone’s anger.

Ten took a drink right after, did not gild under the indirect kiss. It was a good sign, Kun decided, and his head quickly ballooned with a sense of deserving, if not entitlement.

“What do you think is going to be different?” Ten was such a good listener, tilted his head in just the right way that they could keep their conversation intimate rather than broadcast it to the few red-eye passengers to be. Kun had noticed when they’d met. “Besides the touching, I mean.”

Kun tried his best to explain the pity in the eyes of his few compatriots when they’d first seen him, after. The words seemed inadequate to him, like he was complaining for the sake of doing so, and his pride would not allow him that. Not here. Not with Ten looking at him like he was everything the world had to offer even when he was coming up short in the most hilarious and contemptible of ways.

So he settled. “When something is wrong with you, something that wasn’t wrong before, people think they have to change more than you do, so that you don’t notice the change. But the thing is...you _have_ changed, and you do notice, and them trying to accommodate you just makes it more obvious.”

And Ten found that interesting, leaned in to hear some more. That much was clear in the tempting curl of his mouth. Kun wanted again to kiss him, but did not, because he could not figure out if it was because he needed comfort, or because he thought Ten might. It was not conducive to a memorable first time. Ten, he knew, deserved more than an attempt at grasping something that might not even exist.

“You’re drinking tonight,” said Kun, trying to divert the subject, just for a minute, just long enough that he didn’t have to think of more apt metaphors, or find an explanation for why he felt the way he did. “Are you going home after this?”

Ten sparkled, luminescent, even in the low light of the bar. He was so alive that the thought of him, statued and unmoving for as long as curses were said to last, tore Kun to pieces. “I planned on going somewhere,” he said, soft and sweet, his breath warm as it fanned against the curve of Kun’s cheek. “But after that I’m going to take a break from following my doctor, if I can help it at all.”

“Tell me about your doctor,” breathed Kun, hoping that Ten could show the restraint that he did. They could both go about ignoring the way that Kun’s gaze had flickered to the pretty bow of Ten’s upper lip, the drop of drink hidden inside it, waiting to be kissed away, should the tides turn.

“He works in curses,” said Ten. “Magical maladies. He’s one of the foremost in the world. It’d be fun if he weren’t so involved in the work, and its implications, but most doctors I’ve worked with are like that, so I just sort of...” He shrugged his elegant shoulders. The breath that had barely sustained Kun nearly rushed out of him, all at once. “I could talk to him for you, if you wanted.”

_No,_ said Kun’s head. _No,_ pleaded his heart. “Yes,” said his traitorous mouth.

Ten beamed, and it was the first thing in recent memory that Kun could feel was just for him, not some agenda being chased between the pair of them. “I promise he’ll be good to you. Fix everything if he can.” He reached into the space between them, too small to feel like the chasm it truly was, and brushed his fingertips along the crook of Kun’s clothed elbow.

Kun jumped away, face afire. He went to apologise, but Ten just laughed and laughed and laughed, until he cried out his own version of sorry.

///

Ten sat with Kun in the waiting room of his doctor's office. Despite the astringent distraction in the air, the tension that kept Kun from slumping over into himself until he simply disappeared, it felt like absolution -- like somehow Kun hadn't ruined this chance to know someone so beguiling for himself. He was grateful, and showed it by keeping his mouth shut, his eyes glued to the gloves on his hands, keeping him from ruining anything more. 

Ten helped Kun with the paperwork of visiting a doctor for the first time, asking questions in various dramatic tones. It managed to draw at least the occasional chuckle from Kun’s heavy chest. Eventually, though, the questions came to an end, and they were left with news broadcasts, the occasional beeping and whirring of a photocopier. Kun's leg shook, an attempt to calm the energy that surged through him in sixty-second cycles. Ten spoke, a playful edge to his voice.

"Do you usually find strangers in bars?"

An odd question, thought Kun. He glanced up, miserable, and caught mischief in Ten's eyes. "I don't usually find anyone. I guess they find me."

"Do you call your parents often?"

Kun swallowed and rested his gloved hand on Ten's knee. "I call them often enough that they don't think something's wrong, or that I'm avoiding them."

"Do you want to have kids someday?"

"Do you usually conduct dates like they're job interviews?" Kun shot back, a little surprised by the sharpness of his own tone. "Sorry, I just--"

"Being with me _is_ a job," intoned Ten, marvelously even, with a tilt of his head. He arched a brow, just a moment, a flash of something that could be. “Is this a date? Me taking you to the doctor?”

Kun realised the slip and joked, "I don't have a job right now." He used his unoccupied hand to tug at the collar of his sweater, finding it suddenly very warm in the temperature-controlled office. The other thumbed over the curve of Ten's kneecap. "I could have that one, if you wanted, if you got to know me beside this..."

"It's not a sob story," Ten assured him, and the serendipity of them finishing one another’s thoughts was a kindness Kun was not ready to acknowledge. "I hear these things a lot. Gods are angry things."

And it was funny, thought Kun, that he was far more afraid of Ten's rejection than that of the god he'd already faced. "I might want kids someday," he said at last, and he was so _tired_ that when he sagged against Ten's shoulder, just for a second, it was a relief to not have to carry the burden all on his own. "Maybe. If I get this fixed. Wouldn't it be awful, to never touch your own child?"

At this, Ten flinched away, minutely, like Kun wasn't meant to notice. He had, however, and inched closer, until their shoulders brushed, their elbows connected. Ten was close enough that they might hold hands, should Kun be able to swallow his pride long enough to do it. "Maybe not as awful as you think."

"Do _you_ meet strangers in bars a lot?" Kun asked.

He did not get an answer, because a nurse ducked into the waiting room and called his name. He followed the procedure -- height, weight, blood pressure, medical history despite the fact he and Ten had put it to paper as best they could. When the syringe came out -- "You _are_ fasting, aren't you?" asked the nurse, and Ten nodded along with him when he answered in the affirmative -- Ten was kind enough to put his hand on Kun's shoulder.

"Thank you," mumbled Kun, scarlet, and Ten waved it away. Kun had so rarely met people who did not think they were entitled to his thanks that he stumbled his way through the rest of the interview. He stared at his blood in its tube, waiting to be sent off to some laboratory that would probably tell the doctor nothing they needed to know. Seeing that part of himself, outside his body, brought Kun a peace he did not fully understand, and therefore did not speak aloud.

The doctor, when he finally came in, was younger than Ten had led him to believe. "Nice to meet you," he said with a wave. "I'm Dr. Moon."

His face was kind, he did not wear the starched white lab jackets doctors were known for, and actually read the chart the PA had provided him. Kun did not trust him, because Kun did not trust anyone right now, but Ten looked at him like he was some sort of pillar of the universe, and that was enough that Kun didn’t simply leave. "Tell me what happened to you," said Dr. Moon.

Kun told the story, from start to finish, about the prayers he said when he could sleep, and when he couldn’t, and the god that had answered him in an airport bar. Aloud, it seemed ridiculous, something out of a childhood parable meant to warn people to keep virtuous. When he finished he found himself out of breath, though he could not be sure whose gaze upon him was making him. Dr. Moon appraised him for a long moment, and then said, "It can be helped," with the air of someone commenting on the rain falling from the sky.

Ten beamed. "He's a genius, I told you."

"What do I have to do?" Kun asked, scrambling, the hands he'd been wringing in his lap coming up as if to clutch at the doctor's collar, drag his secrets from him.

The doctor just sort of smiled, tugged at the lapels of his sport jacket in Kun’s stead, wrinkling the pale pink tee underneath. "You have to be vulnerable with someone."

Kun had expected climbing a mountain, bathing in a virgin spring, a blood sacrifice. "Why--"

"I know the god who cursed you," said the doctor, grinning so brightly that his brilliance matched Ten's, the pair of them making an eerie set. "He wants you to swallow your pride."

"To... to apologise?" Kun's head spun with myriad possibilities. "To the god?"

"No," answered Dr. Moon, swiftly, sitting down at his computer to presumably make a couple notes on Kun's file. "He wants you to give yourself to someone, to prove that it isn't him but you that has the problem. That's my recommendation, anyway."

Ten parked himself just beside Kun on the exam table, drew up his legs beneath himself, folding into some inhuman origami piece. Elegant. Admirable. Kun trembled, sputtered, tried not to focus on it too deeply -- he was so prone to distraction from his problems, after all. "Is-- so that’s it? That's everything?" If not sacrifices, he’d expected prescription pads, pills, something to suppress the symptoms of this thing he’d been given. Neither expectation had been filled, and Kun was adrift.

"Yes," said Dr. Moon, suddenly disinterested. His computer had gone from medical records to what appeared to be a word processor. He did not look up from the screen again. "Hey, is there any way I could convince you to speak at a conference? It's in a month. Maybe if you're cured by then you can present your case to the other curse specialists."

Kun stared at the doctor like he'd grown a second head. "No."

And the good doctor had the gall to look crestfallen, even in profile. Kun still did not trust him, wanted to ask him a dozen questions that had been answered in one -- but when Ten rested his temple on the back of Kun’s shoulder, it was at the very least enough to soothe.

///

Somehow, they always gravitated toward the bar again. Their meeting place, after all, held magic of untold varieties (the remnants of a curse notwithstanding). Ten paid for Kun's drinks, all two of them, and they stayed for hours, talking about everything and nothing. The bartender had tried to convince them to leave, in his own roundabout way, but they refused him. Instead they tucked into a booth, cozy, with their hips together, as if they’d always been that way, as if today wasn’t the first time they’d seen each other under the warm light of the sun instead of the clandestine cover of night. 

Kun very quickly found himself obsessing over the way his laugh sounded, the way he smiled too much when Ten was around, the way he kept wanting to touch Ten despite it being quite possibly the worst idea he'd ever had.

Eventually, it came up, and Kun did his best to hold his chin high.

“What are you going to do about the curse?” asked Ten, enigmatic as ever. “I mean… you have a cure. But--”

“But nothing,” sighed Kun, something akin to resignation resonating from his core outward. “I don’t know that I can do what it is he asked me to do.” His drink, long replaced with tonic water and lemon, seemed to stare back at him when he gazed into it. It was, all in all, a strange feeling, but stranger still was the urge to pretend like Ten wasn’t looking at him just the same.

Their knees bumped together under the table. Kun wanted to run. He was not good enough for someone so magnificent -- not as he was right now, anyhow, though he could not explain well enough to himself why not.

“You think it’s that hard?” asked Ten, who had some minutes ago pillowed his cheek on Kun’s shoulder. “To find someone you can be yourself around?” Kun chanced a glance downward, caught Ten’s eye. He found that he was no longer the sparkling jester Kun had met some weeks ago, but rather something softer, glimmering, full of a care that neither of them could afford to express to one another. “I feel like--”

“Oh, I can--”

“Do you want me not to talk?” Glittering turned into a haze of irritation, which haloed the both of them at once. “I can shut up.”

“Can you?” asked Kun, all confidence.

And Ten pinched Kun’s side, tenderly, like there was something else he wanted but couldn’t ask for. “Are you still drunk?” he asked, ginger with his cadence.

“I never was,” Kun admitted, “except for maybe a second.”

“That’s good.” Ten moved, shifted, so that his opposite shoulder was pressed against the presumably sticky booth in which they both sat. He curled his ankle around Kun’s and drew them closer together. “Do you want to kiss me?”

“And why would I want to do that?” asked Kun, and he did not know not to tease, since he did not think of Ten as something delicate, some butterfly on the wind that would crash back down to earth with a severed wing.

Ten’s mouth turned downward instantly, like he’d taken the lemon from Kun’s drink and popped it into his mouth whole. “Because I would like to be kissed,” he said, after a long pause. He searched Kun’s face for a long moment, then hung his head. “Nevermind. I’ll text you sometime.”

“Without my number?” asked Kun, amusement and alarm rising up in him in equal measure. That, at least, earned him time to regain his bearings. Ten paused under the table, where he’d been crawling in a desperate attempt to escape, his temple resting on Kun’s knee incidentally.

They stayed like this long enough that the bartender came over to check on them, suspicious. The relief he must have felt was visible in the set of his heavy brow when he peered into the space between the table and the booth seat and found no indecent exposure. “Can you two leave or something? You’re scaring all my customers.”

Ten, popping up from beneath the table, peered around at the mostly empty tables. “What customers, sir?” he asked quietly, but paid his tab with respect and flushed cheeks nonetheless.

It so happened that they were walking in the same direction, trying to find separate rides home. “You didn’t drive this morning?” Kun asked, an attempt to make conversation. Ten fiddled with his phone, pressing far too many buttons to be simply sharing a contact number.

“No. You didn’t tell me where you lived. I didn’t know how far I’d be driving. The office is easy.” The sentences came out stilted. Ten was focused on whatever he was doing; he paused, snapped a photo of himself. “None of mine are good enough. You deserve to see the best side of me.”

_I already have,_ thought Kun as they parted ways at last, Ten waving him away as he hopped onto the inter-terminal train. He watched for far too long as the rail car pulled out of the station and disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.

Kun thought he’d take the long walk anyway, clear his head. He did not look to see what Ten had done, though the notification popped up anyway. A good photo. Ten was so much to look at directly; seeing him this way, frozen in a photograph, was looking into an eclipse by using a paper cup -- bearable, but nowhere near as perfect as it would be, could he see the whole thing.

Instead, he texted Johnny. Overhead, the moon and the impossible trail of parking lot lights guided him to the lot where the drivers usually waited. _Am I vulnerable?_ he asked, sure his best friend would be honest with him.

_You’ve always been soft,_ Johnny told him. A minute passed. _But I don’t think it’s the same thing._

Just ahead, Kun’s ride was waiting for him, ready to carry him into what was sure to be a sleepless night. He stared at his phone, then his car, trying so hard to figure out what it meant that his head started to get dizzy, heavy, his curse enacted upon himself.

Better him than someone else, he decided as he slid into the artificial cold of the backseat.

///

In the morning, Kun texted Ten. He felt as if he owed Ten some sort of apology, for not kissing him, for talking like he knew something he didn’t, for whatever it was he’d done wrong. Curled in his bed with nothing to do but sit with his own thoughts, Kun watched as an amber bar of sunlight passed slowly across his bedroom floor.

Ten was not a quick responder. Kun hated that even more, hated that he had probably done that to himself. 

Alone in his house, he did the things he might normally if he were going to work. He made himself breakfast. He read a book while the cooking happened. He let the coffee make slowly, its scent filling the air. Only one thing he turned gold this morning, and it was the spatula he’d had since he’d moved out of his college dorm and into his own place, one of the first concessions he’d bought himself as an adult living on his own for the first time.

He stared at it, and then figured it could be used anyway. Not all cursed things deserved discard.

Eventually, Ten got back to him, and it was just a string of emoji. While trying to decipher this, Kun received another message. _You don’t need to be sorry,_ which made him feel strangely absolved, in the same way that time in Ten’s doctor’s waiting room had. _I just got ahead of myself. It happens._

“I _would_ have kissed you,” grumbled Kun, tuning in a second too late. It was a mistake. What if he’d accidentally called Ten in his flubbing? 

But even then, as the column of his throat turned carmine and tingled with warmth, Kun decided it was true.

///

They started spending more time together, if not for any reason other than they both had the time to do so. Kun took Ten to his favourite bookstores, his regular restaurants, few and far between as either were. Ten, despite looking cosmopolitan and having traveled the world, did not turn up his nose at these little comforts. He loved art, loved books, loved to eat -- most things, anyhow -- loved spending time with Kun when he had the chance.

In turn, Ten brought Kun to the city, showed him art exhibitions that his friends had put on, and took him to dance shows that took place in nightclubs. Despite feeling out of place Kun couldn’t say he ever once felt uncomfortable, if only because Ten was there at his side, dragging him into the fun of things rather than letting him linger at the sidelines with his chin held high. The shows in particular were something that Kun found he enjoyed more than he thought he might, seeing as the idea of rubbing elbows with sweaty strangers sparked in him an anxiety he could not contain. “Are you sure this is okay?” he kept asking Ten, who shot him that mysterious smile. “I don’t want to--”

“Dance with me,” he pleaded, bottom lip sticking out in a way that could only be described as _alluring_. He flung his arms around Kun’s neck, pulled him close. The way they moved together was so perfect, so fated, that Kun would have been a fool to deny it. With his nose against Ten’s crown, he could breathe in the intoxicating scent of Ten, let himself be dizzy.

When Ten peered up at him with those eyes, glitter clinging to the hollow of his clavicle, Kun almost gave in to lesser instincts -- but no, Ten deserved better than a first kiss on a dance floor, surrounded by people who would not appreciate him for what he was.

Outside the club, Ten wound his arm round Kun’s and dragged him along, singing the praises of a restaurant just a couple blocks away. It was dark, well past two in the morning and every other streetlight in the city had been blown out. They were just two people, trying to find a way home. So really, Kun should not have been surprised when a strange young man jumped out of the alley they were passing, pressed a knife to the small of his back.

“Give me your wallet,” growled a voice, almost familiar. The voice of the god that cursed him -- but no, that couldn’t be right.

Up ahead Ten skipped along, ignorant of the situation happening just behind him. Kun prayed for him to turn, and he did.

Turning on his heel, Kun faced his assailant. He wore a mask, as if the darkness did not conceal him thoroughly enough. The hand that held the knife was shaking. 

Kun sighed, shoulders sagging, as if fear had not injected itself into his veins and set his thoughts to racing. He tugged off a glove with his teeth, which the boy did not seem to like. He raised the knife higher, pointed it at Kun’s face.

From somewhere behind him, Ten called his name. Kun would have done anything to protect that innocence a little while longer, but the prospect of Ten being put in danger due to inaction was far more important than anything he could think of.

So he grabbed the boy’s wrist in his bare hand, and closed his eyes to the screams that flooded the street. 

Kun could feel Ten watching him, but didn’t say a thing until it was all over. The boy, mid-writhe, dropped to the earth, a statue of himself. He heard the sprinting footsteps, turned away just in time, his bare hand behind his back.

“Please, be careful,” Kun pleaded. All Ten could do was sob as he clung to Kun’s waist, arms round him holding him tightly. His entire body trembled. Kun dragged his still-gloved fingers through Ten’s hair, to calm him, to do _anything_ that might help. It only made Ten cry harder, until he slumped against Kun and his sobs grew muted.

All around them, the street became nothing but distant smoke, its dim lighting fires in a gap Kun could not cross. All that was there in this moment was the two of them, and yet, he could not help but think that Ten wished it was anyone but them alone.

///

The hours passed like days, the days like weeks, Kun having found himself alone again. Not unaccompanied, of course, because Johnny made a point to visit him almost daily. Ten was still messaging every day. Still, it was lonesome in a way that Kun could not explain.

Johnny always made it a point to ask Kun what he meant to do for the day. Like he was somehow afraid that leaving Kun to his own devices would get him in trouble. Kun grimaced at the way in which it happened, always after their second cup of coffee. It was a wonder Johnny didn’t take his breakfast with his husband rather than with his best friend.

“I don’t know,” said Kun, more often than not. But over the last day or so he’d picked up an interest. “I think I want to learn something. Maybe it’ll help me figure out the cure a little better.”

“Oh, so you’re not going to do what the doctor said?” Johnny teased, resting his empty, still-warm mug on the countertop with a decidedl _clink_. “I think maybe you should listen to him.”

Kun laughed. “You said it yourself. I’m soft. I’m not vulnerable.”

He did not miss the worry in his friend’s eyes.

It became routine, after just a few days, if only because Johnny was the sort of person who enjoyed ritual almost as much as he did “spontaneous” trips to his friend’s house to check on him. But it was not the sort of routine that Kun could see himself coming to enjoy and, in time, his patience wore thin.

That day, the rain poured down outside, dampening any plans Kun might have had to fix the overgrown mess that had become his backyard recently. Johnny had come over precisely at eight-fifteen, always an early riser and with the ghost of his abandoned husband on his heels. Kun had come to fondly think of him as some alarm clock, but this morning it was all he could do not to throw his pillow at the door and tuck himself back into bed.

“I brought croissants,” Johnny tempted from the doorway. Sure enough, the bedroom filled with the scent of butter and flaky pastry. “If you want one, I mean. Do you want me to start the coffee?”

Kun had just grumbled. It took him a little while, but he dragged himself from bed, barely awake enough to change out of his pyjamas and into something sort of presentable.

The coffee had, in fact, been started by the time he rolled himself downstairs, feeling every bit the log he’d become. “Good morning,” chirped Johnny, sunshine in spite of a cloudy day. The rain beat against the window was so loudly it could have been a hapless teen in a horror film. Kun watched it contemplatively as he drank his coffee, the mug warming his fingertips.

“Are you going to do what the doctor said?” he asked, and for the first time, Kun could not bear it any longer.

Kun sighed, cleared the cup Johnny had left on the countertop, and placed it in the bottom of the sink. “I think maybe it’d be better if you _minded your own business_.”

And Johnny, like Ten, shrank back from the sharpness Kun offered him. Kun did not know what to with this information, that he was somehow terrifying to everyone he loved and cared for. He wondered if perhaps he should make new friends rather than try to hold onto the old ones.

When Johnny left, Kun realised something: if he did not want to listen to Dr. Moon, he did not know what to do. So instead of passing his time with idle curiosity, Kun looked up information on his condition online, Eventually even the internet gave out so little that Kun found himself frustrated, and he took himself to the library to find out more than the internet offered. 

It was between the stacks of books that he found his god again, depicted in ancient art.

Of course, the ancients were not as proficient in capturing the face as one might be today, but the scar through the eyebrow was unmistakable. 

Kun stared at the image for so long that he could not think, head full of static, of broken wings, of the look in that poor kid’s eyes when he’d been turned to gold. When at last reason returned to him, he threw the book across the silent study room he’d rented himself, and remained unsatisfied with the slide of it against the wall.

His research turned up little, save medical journals the likes of which Kun couldn’t read for the life of him. Every time he tried to decipher the technical terms he felt on the verge of sleep, and more than a few times ducked his head to rest against the cool laminate of the table. When he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the god who had condemned him to suffering, and could not sleep.

This was his cycle, even at home. He shrunk away from himself.

Eventually he realised that he should probably get hold of someone who could read this. His phone lingered in his pocket, heavy, still not golden. This was his fourth, the third lost in a wrong number that had woken him from a late-morning nap. It was a sad measure of a man, he’d decided, to be able to tell how many phones he’d been through. 

He swallowed his pride and dialed Ten, who answered like someone who’d forgotten his own name, let alone anyone else’s. “Who’s this?” he asked, a bit groggily, reminiscent of a few hangovers Kun had occurred in his lifetime.

“Kun,” came the answer, dryly. “Did you forget me already? It’s only been a week since we saw each other…”

There was some fumbling on the other end, staticky. “No. No, I didn’t forget you. I just, uh...hold on a second?”

Kun held his tongue dutifully and was rewarded a full minute later. “Sorry. Hi. I was working on translating a speech for Dr. Moon. What do you need? Is everything okay?”

The silence hung there. Kun debated hanging up. “No, everything isn’t okay,” he admitted at last, though it could have very well killed him to say as much. “I miss you.”

Ten, on the other end, made a small noise, an _oh_ that was indecipherable. “I just… I’m sorry. I’ve been freaking out over the whole--”

“You don’t have to not be afraid of me to be my friend,” said Kun, flatly. “And anyway, I need help understanding something and you’re the only person I can ask.”

“Is that so?” Ten’s tone, always just a touch too quick to turn playful, nagged at Kun, the idea that they’d never once parted present in the very forefront of his mind. “I mean, I can help you with anything you need help with, but I don’t think _that_ is why you called _me_.”

“You’re right. I just called because I missed you. When can I see you again?” Kun sat back in his chair, knees spread wide as he tilted it beneath him, until it smacked against the wall and supported him for all he was worth. “Can I see you today? I feel like I haven’t seen you in a year.”

“Depends. Are you spending time with Johnny today?”

Kun, for the record, did not recall telling Ten a thing about Johnny, least of all that they’d been spending far more time together than they ever had when they’d gone to school together. He frowned, and sat forward in his chair, which chose that exact moment to flip out from beneath him. He guffawed at the shift in gravity, groaned when his chin cracked against the linted carpet.

“I’m not spending time with Johnny today, no,” he said softly, when he’d caught his breath.

“Did you fall?” He could see Ten so clearly, worrying at his bottom lip. “Are you alright?”

“I’m alright.” He lifted his head, checked for evidence of his touch left behind in the accidental fall, found no glimmer or gleam to mark his presence. “Room’s alright, too. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

It was in that moment that Ten decided to break Kun’s heart. “How can I not worry about you?” he asked, in a voice so small that Ten himself might shatter simply for using it.

The ache in his chest, hollowed-out and heavy, Kun decided, was far worse than the throb of his jaw.

///

Things were sort of normal after that. Johnny came to visit less after their disagreement, citing that Jungwoo wanted to see him, that work was busy, that he didn’t have the time like he had but a few short days prior. Ten came to the country more, his vacation seemingly endless, and his patience even more so. They would curl up on the couch together, barefoot and in sweats, Ten’s head in Kun’s lap or, occasionally, the other way around. 

Though Kun was loathe to admit it, he loved the feeling of Ten’s fingers in his hair, even if it occasionally caught on one of the myriad rings Ten so loved to wear, even if he was sometimes jerked from the painful grip of sleep.

In the light of morning, when Kun had finally rested, he took in Ten’s face, and knew that nothing glimmering and golden could possibly look as perfect as the utter peace that had folded itself into Ten’s features, worked its way through the casual drape of his frame over the side of Kun’s couch. 

Sometimes Ten dressed in Kun’s clothes because he hadn’t brought enough for himself. The sleeves of Kun’s sweaters covered Ten to the fingertips, the material threatened to swallow him whole. It had never once occurred to Kun that Ten might be simply human, that he might be something small, delicate, worthy of protection.

Kun cooked, sometimes. Things that reminded him of a home not so far out, things that reminded Ten of a childhood he didn’t really get the chance to have. They spoke of everything and nothing, Kun teasing Ten about sanitation when he sat on the countertop and watched Kun methodically chop vegetables they’d picked up from the market together. Ten drank wine that didn’t pair with Kun’s cooking, stubborn in the way he did so, refuting every attempt Kun made to get him to switch, not that he was much an expert in choosing these things himself.

“It makes me happy,” Ten pointed out, bottom lip jutting.

Kun found he quite liked the idea of making Ten happy.

Though he did not know much about love, Kun knew what it looked like in the films, in the books he sometimes made himself read, in the eyes of the few people with whom he was in contact that had managed to find it. He knew, in the marrow of his bones, that he could love Ten, given enough time.

That did not erase the sense that time was running out.

From time to time, they would be out, and Ten would fix Kun with this look of longing, one that defied explanation. They had not talked about kissing since that night in the bar, after meeting Ten’s doctor.

They weren’t homebodies near as much as one might have thought looking at them, and Ten came to learn the smaller town in which Kun lived almost as well as Kun himself. It was more than just the airport, although most of the people that lived there also worked someplace on that sprawling property. It was more than just their bar. In time Kun came to take Ten on his favourite walks through his favourite parks, and the way Ten sparkled in the sunshine made Kun think that no gold idol could ever compare to his beauty and allure. 

It was a thought he had in private and, seeing as he had no more friends, it would stay that way. Kun, after all, did not deserve something that good. Not as he was right now.

Ten slowly learned more about Johnny, through no fault of his own. The longer they went without seeing one another, the more unbearable it became for Kun -- until he was angry, and the gold that sat beneath his skin boiled in his veins as well. It was almost natural, to talk about the fight that wasn’t, and Ten was such a good listener. So interested. So caring. 

“I just don’t understand where he gets off trying to tell me what to do about something like this,” said Kun over dinner. The restaurant around them was just loud enough that Kun didn’t mind discussing his detriment in an open and honest way, the clinking of spoons and occasional cry of a fussy child enough to drown out any self-consciousness he had left. “It’s like...like, he doesn’t know what I’m going through. And this whole thing--” Here Kun gave a demonstrative wave of his hand, the glove crinkling as he flapped it about, “has _nothing_ to do with him. What gives him the right?”

Ten, mouth poised over a glass of water, traced a line in the condensation of his drink with a pinky. “He’s lost his friend, too, you know,” he said, patience radiating from him just as the sunshine seemed to. “You’re different than you were when I met you.”

Kun stopped mid-bite, and looked upon Ten with a measure of incredulity that he did not think possible. “What do you mean by that?” he asked slowly. Though they had bickered before, occasionally -- more than occasionally, Ten preferring tea to coffee and Kun preferring to sleep with a light off rather than on and neither able to decide what sort of film they’d like to watch together or the venue for their next so-called date -- this, he knew, was more.

“You were kinder to yourself. Like you felt better.” Ten, who had not caught on to the fact that there was a storm brewing behind Kun’s eyes, said it so matter of factly that it would set anyone’s blood pressure to rise. “And, you know, I get it, because you’re not supposed to feel good when bad shit happens to you, but the thing is… I don’t know. You were more confident. It was nice to see. Not that you’re bad to see now.” Ten must have caught on to the feeling between them, and was staring at his reflection in the glass top table rather than meeting Kun’s eye. “I like you either way, you know. But that you was someone I could have fallen in love with.”

The mere mention of love, such a vast word and an even grander concept, set Kun afire, every nerve at the nape of his neck prickling with tension. He reached into the chasm between them, growing larger every word Ten spoke, and tipped Ten’s chin so their eyes might meet.

“Am I not that someone now?” he asked, voice low, too serious to be considered flirtation. On the table top his hands started to shake; he placed them palms-down, hoping that the effort would make the tremour less noticeable.

And Ten only looked away, a quick slide of his gaze that told Kun everything he needed to know. “What was it?” he asked, voice raising just a fraction, just enough that he commanded attention without putting hands on Ten again. “Was it the mugging? Was it that?”

Ten hesitated a long while, visibly struggling to string the words together. At last he said, “You don’t trust me. Or, at least, it doesn’t seem like you do. No, stop -- you asked a question, I just want to answer it. Besides, dating me is a full time job, remember? I don’t want to distract you from what you need to do to get better.”

What was it that he needed to do, even? Kun fumed, the air between them growing so silent that even the chatter of the restaurant couldn’t possibly distract from his anger, the weight it left upon them both.

“I should go,” said Ten, lamely, taking back his person from between Kun’s leathered fingertips.

“No, please,” and Kun couldn’t remember the last time he had asked for someone’s attention. His brows tented. His limbs shook. He felt as if he might faint from the whiplash of it all. “Please, I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” said Ten softly, “hanging around in the hopes you might change your mind. It’s a waste of your time. You focus on getting your friend back, first.”

Like a ghost in a childhood cartoon, Ten vanished into the ether, not even affording Kun a chance to watch him go a last time.

///

Ten went back to work just a couple days after their argument. Kun did not even have the grace to find this out firsthand; he called to make a followup appointment with Ten’s doctor, and the poor girl who answered the phone had had to deal with his ire when telling him that “unfortunately, the Doctor is out of the country at the moment”. Ten had already explained: wherever Dr. Moon went, so too did Ten.

Just like that, it was over. Everything was falling into place, and Kun had to reconcile what was wrong inside himself alone, without the distraction of someone constantly at his side.

His hip ached for having lost the one glued to it. He stared at his couch, around his house, at the spot Ten had occupied in his kitchen, and knew that something was missing. He wasn’t even fool enough to deny what it was. But the pride in his throat burned, lodged there, and he could not swallow it even if it would have saved his life.

So, like a ghost often did, Kun went back to his old haunts. Uncured, he still was not welcome at work. His contract had not yet expired, and the boss -- his, not the big one, but rather the hangar manager who gave everyone assignments and helped with morale -- kept texting him, clockwork, once a week. _You’re welcome back as soon as you’re better_ , said the messages, as if Kun had any hope of being better when his one chance at breaking the curse had been removed from him, a limb from an amputee.

In the late nights, when Kun had not slept for days and his prayers had not yet been answered, he thought of taking his hands, but how stupid it would be, to carve off one’s nose to spite one’s face? He could not stomach the thought of that much blood, anyhow. There was no indication in his research that told him he would not continue to simply destroy everything he touched even without hands.

Back at the bar, Kun still felt as out of place as he ever had. His pilot friends had mainly forgotten to keep track of Kun’s mood, and for the most part had gone back to treating him like he was one of them. Nevermind the fact that he hadn’t seen them in the context of work in far too many days for any of them to count.

It was nice, to be included.

Sicheng, the most attentive of the three of them, occasionally leaned over to whisper in Kun’s ear. “Are you alright?” he asked, tone surprisingly gentle. “You just look so...sad.”

Here Kun thought of golden wings, and of humility, and the pride that hadn’t allowed him to give his all to whatever it was he’d wanted to do. He said a prayer under his breath, careful, concerned. “I’m going to be okay,” he lied outright, looking Sicheng in the eye.

And Sicheng just looked at him the same way everyone in Kun’s life had come to.

Everyone, of course, except Ten.

It was more than Kun could bear, heavier still than any statue, any sculpture he could create simply by touching. Kun broke, the levee holding in all the emotions he’d tried to put in their rightful places giving way beneath the heft of his own ego. He told Sicheng of Ten, and of the doctor, and of the night he’d been cursed and what he’d been tasked with doing. It took so long that his voice rose in increments, that he started to hiccup with the fast pace of it all, and he had to keep amending himself with little details because those _mattered_ , damn him.

Soon enough Hendery and Yukhei grew silent, rapt attention in their wide eyes. “It sounds like you really like him, ge,” said Yukhei when the story was over, “and that you should probably tell him that.” 

“And tell Johnny why he hurt you,” added Hendery, the ghost of a smile pulling at his lips. “How do old people get so bad at communication? Is it just lack of practise?”

It was the wrong thing to say, and it hurt, but after everything he’d been through the past month and a half, Kun could take being hurt a little more. So instead he threw back his head and laughed, something he knew he hadn’t done for ages. 

Not since he’d last seen Ten.

Though his friends quickly dispersed, their encouraging words still ringing bells in Kun’s head, he did not leave quite yet. There was no reason to stay in the bar, and yet he did, clinging to his table, watching the bartender with a careful eye as the burly man collected empty glasses long abandoned at all other tables. 

“Where’s your friend?” asked the bartender, his tub full of clanking cups balanced precariously against his hip. “I haven’t seen him in awhile.”

“Out of the country,” replied Kun, distracted. But was that the case? He picked his phone from his jacket pocket, sent Ten a message. “He works as a medical translator. Lots of travel.”

“Yeah? He seems like that. Smart. Not too smart for you, though.” And here the bartender offered a ghost of a smile as he sauntered away.

It was strange, the little differences kindness could make. Kun had never allowed them from others until recently; he was still adjusting to them.

His phone lit up, still clutched tight in his hand. He hadn’t expected a response, not after the last time they’d seen one another and especially not when Ten was out of the country. But the message was easy, a quick dash of something, emoji with no interpretation. “What the fuck,” he said aloud, to his phone screen, a frown tugging at his mouth. “What the fuck?”

And when he looked up from his phone, his mouth dropped open. His face turned the colour of lacewing butterflies. He tried to speak, and could not, if only because the man standing before him had more power over him than any god he’d ever dreamed of could have exercised.

Ten bent at the waist so prettily. He smiled, his sharp teeth glinting in the barlight. “I missed you, too,” he sang, and it was all Kun could do not to explode.

Instead, his rational brain took over, just long enough that he could ask, “Can I kiss you?”

And Ten, in response, took Kun’s face between his perfect palms, and kissed him like nothing had ever mattered to him like that before.

///

Despite Kun’s assumptions that Ten deserved better, Ten didn’t seem to think the same. It was because of this that they’d talked, just a little, just enough that they got the idea between kisses. The booth still stank of them when they stumbled away, their arms wrapped around one another.

Kun had every intention of bringing Ten home with him. Ten, it seemed, had other ideas. “C’mere,” he said, sharp, soft, tugging at Kun’s elbow and pulling him in the direction of the hangar where Kun had once worked.

It seemed all at once too coincidental, but Kun was so fed up with _waiting_ , with letting his pride keep him from taking things that were so kindly given him, that he pushed the thought away. “It isn’t the mile high club unless we’re flying,” Kun joked, breathless, aroused even by the prospect of sneaking around. “Are you serious, right now?”

“Shut up, you haven’t stopped looking at my ass since we met,” Ten teased. The security badge Kun carried in his wallet still worked; he marveled as the access door swung open, revealing a completely abandoned garage. Above them towered a jet, so large that Kun could barely comprehend it, having not seen one this close in nigh on two months. 

“Can we get in?” asked Ten in a breathy whisper. His hand found Kun’s in the shadows. 

“No,” said Kun, “but I know something else we could do.” He led the way through the offices, ignoring the gentle rattling of the catwalks as they clanged together in the breeze given by the A/C units that blew through the night. Every door opened to him. He pressed Ten against each, asking every time, “Are you sure?” as if he couldn’t comprehend that this was his, that Ten’s kissed-cherry mouth was his responsibility as well as his pride.

Each time, Ten became more, curling his fingers in the hem of Kun’s jacket, the overgrown line of his hair, the nape of his neck. “Yes,” he replied, each time, pressing the pair of them together.

Their clothes started streaming behind them, contrails of their hesitation that marked their passage. Ten shed his own jacket first, of course, but Kun was quick to follow, divesting himself of the burden of clothes when all he craved was skin on skin. They traipsed down hallways, pinning one another to walls, to boardroom doors, to the water cooler that decorated the lobby where the sad dream of ficuses did not. Despite the apparent wandering, Kun knew where he wanted to go. He had mapped his flight plan there, and was taking the path most travelled, wondering that he hadn’t done this before in all his time working late in the hangar. 

When at last they’d lost the majority of their clothing, Kun took his time, looking Ten up and down, drinking in his fill. Ten’s bare skin was a marvel, even more wonderful than the face he’d been admiring all this time -- he was so soft, so smooth, as if nothing hard had ever happened to him. It was because of this that he touched the flat plane of Ten’s belly with his palm and with all the reverence someone who once didn’t believe in gods could possibly contain. To him, Ten was something worthy of worship.

Ten moaned, low, throaty, when Kun kissed over the point of his pulse, beating heavy against the slim column of his neck. Still, they wandered, until they came upon the place Kun had been trying to find. Though Ten was wonderful at following, it had not yet occurred to him that there was a flight path they were tracing through the offices.

The sign on the door read _PRESIDENT_ , all officious. Ten’s smirk gleamed with the same bright and wicked light as Kun’s, the pair of them seemingly created to smile together if only for the artistry of it, and they let themselves in.

The desk was bigger than Kun remembered it, if only because he had blocked out what little interaction he’d had there. Ten sat upon it, now dressed only in his underwear, and beckoned Kun to him. “Is this okay?” he asked, almost a mockery. “You want to fuck on this desk?”

And Kun made a high keen in the back of his throat. “Only if you’ll have me,” he said, fitting himself between Ten’s parted knees.

Someone would have seen them. Someone would have called security. Kun couldn’t find that he cared, not anymore, not when Ten had so kindly returned to him, and given him everything his heart had ever been afraid to ask for.

They stripped of what little they still wore, the fabric a puddle at Kun’s feet. It was Ten who dared first, reaching between them amidst a flurry of kisses so in sync it made Kun’s heart flutter. His hand wrapped around both their cocks, pressed them together, thumb pushing into the slit of each in turn. Kun could not remember being this aroused before, wanting someone more than he wanted to fuck into the delicate touch offered him. “Oh, Kun,” moaned Ten, burying his face into Kun’s neck. “Oh, fuck, you’re so,” and yet he couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.

Kun rutted into his touch, and his gloved hand wrapped round them both, too, he wincing down at the sight of his clumsy glove when he remembered.

Ten paused, tipped his head up just a touch, kissed their foreheads together. “Does it bother you?” he asked, sweet, too caring for his own good.

“A bit,” admitted Kun, a bead of sweat dripping into the divide of his clavicle. Ten ducked, lapped it up with the flat of his tongue. Suddenly it was Kun’s turn to moan, to thrust into the taut circle of Ten’s fingers, the slide of them together nearly more than he could bear. 

“Can I try something?” asked Ten, after he’d dotted a kiss to the spot his tongue had lavished. “If you’re okay with it, I mean.” When Kun nodded his assent Ten clambered out from beneath him, hands at his bare hips, guiding him to sit on the desk instead, to spread out upon it like some painting of gods long forgotten.

Ten stood there, between Kun’s parted knees, and admired him a long while; the weight of his gaze made Kun twitch, heavy and heated, between his spread thighs, and he whined, just a little. “Don’t tell me you got me like this to just _look_ ,” he teased, weakly at that.

Ten rolled his eyes fondly. “Shut up.” And then he climbed atop Kun, straddling his thighs, their lengths lined up so perfectly it was almost as if they were made for one another.

As Ten rocked into the grip he had on both of them -- both hands wrapped around them, now, making Kun’s eyes roll back into his head -- Kun gripped tight at the gorgeous cream of his thighs, and Ten twitched at the rough texture of fabric upon his skin. His belly burned low with a heat that he hadn’t realised had been building for ages, since the first time he’d met Ten. Kun realised he would give this man everything and anything he asked for without his even asking. 

When Ten leaned down to kiss him, tongue lapping at his, Kun could not help himself, nor the way he dug his fingers into Ten’s flesh, kneading at him, imploring him for more.

And then Ten buried his face in Kun’s neck, a little gasp escaping him here and there as he tried to hiccup out the words. “Do you want to fuck me?” he asked, slowing the insistent stroke of his hands to give Kun room to think. Considerate. Not that it mattered; Kun burned at every point at which their skin made contact. He could not think if his life depended on it. Kun turned his head, inhaled the scent of Ten; he smelled of ancient grapes, of desire, of _gold_ and promises that had yet to be made.

Kun had not wanted anything so badly in a long, long time. Yes, said his head. Yes, said his heart. “No,” said his traitorous mouth, and he was quick to add: “I didn’t bring anything with me.” He paused, shy. “I didn’t think I’d see you ever again.”

Ten bit sharply at the shell of Kun’s ear. “Next time,” he whispered, a vow unable to be broken, “you’re going to come prepared, aren’t you?” It was all Kun could do to nod, agree, sucking in his lip so he didn’t beg for Ten to finish him already. 

The slide of Ten’s hand grew slicker with each passing stroke, precum pooling between them, they both trying to chase their release in a tandem Kun hadn’t known was possible. He felt desired, when Ten peered down his nose, fire in his eyes. He could not remember feeling desired in so long that the life in him sparked, at long last, and he prayed for nothing more than to be devoured.

“Kun, Kun, _Kun_ ,” free hand raking down his chest, palm settling low upon his stomach, pinning him in place. Beneath Kun’s gloved touch his muscles tensed, and he babbled out some warning before saying, “I don’t want to cum yet,” his voice all breath, chest heaving. He bent at the waist, mouth to the join of Kun’s neck and shoulder, and bit in as he jerked only Kun to fruition.

At the points of teeth in his skin Kun teetered over the edge, despite himself, head tipped back against the desk as he writhed beneath Ten, his touch. His cum spilled between them, trailing down the elegant shapes of Ten’s knuckles, the planes of their stomachs.

The placard hat on the desk reading _president_ toppled to the floor, noisy enough to draw Kun from whatever reverie he might have experienced. He ached, his limbs all stretched out, hamstrings drawn as his orgasm shuddered out of him, a slow ebb of waves that breached away from him, further and further with each passing breath.

He peered up at Ten, whose face was still drawn with exertion. “You didn’t finish,” he pointed out, equally breathless, “can I help you with that?” And his entire body protested that he didn’t work it further, but Ten nodded, and Kun’s bodily reproach could be nothing compared to permission from the man who, overnight, had become his god.

Ten flopped back into the office chair, its high back supporting him. Kun followed, boneless, and sank his knees into the thready carpet beneath. For a moment he pillowed his cheek on Ten’s thigh, looked up at him, watched the subtle changes in his face while Kun traced shapes with his fingertip into the soft expanse of skin just above Ten’s knee.

“You’re beautiful,” said Kun, with a voice like a music box, tinkling and carefree. He had not been carefree in far longer than the curse had held him, but in this moment, it would be only to his detriment to care about anything.

Then he swallowed Ten down in one breath, a practised effort, and Ten’s fingers found his hair, and nothing in the world mattered but the salty taste of him at the back of Kun’s throat.

///

They went home. They cleaned up. They spent the night in one another’s arms, watching the moon drift slowly across the sky. As it moved, Kun gently kissed every imprint his gloves had made in Ten’s skin, until they had faded, and Ten he no longer looked as if he’d been imprinted upon.

“Do you remember what I told you when we first met?” Ten asked, facing away now, the curve of him to Kun’s chest. “That I’d rather be drinking wine, but that I had work to do.”

Kun nodded, dipping his head to dust his lips against the curve of Ten’s shoulder, since words would not do. They hadn’t found their clothes after their shower. “You always have work to do,” Kun said, petulant at that. “I wish I were busy like you.”

“You’re busy _with_ me,” Ten protested, snuggling in further, tugging Kun’s arm tighter around him like he was trying to disappear into the spaces between Kun’s ribs. “I told you being with me was a full-time job, didn’t I?”

It felt such a distant memory that Kun had trouble recalling it, but he did all the same, realising that Ten had been right, that all his time and his thoughts had been dedicated to whatever it was Ten was doing since they met -- no, since the curse, since he had thought himself irredeemable. 

There hung between them a hesitation that Kun could not name. “Is everything okay?” he asked, wide awake for the first time in ages.

“I could help you,” Ten said, drowsily. “If you really wanted. It wouldn’t be a fix forever, but I could help.”

“How?” Kun asked, his every atom trembling.

But Ten only met him with the soft, even breathing of sleep.

///

It was at one of their Friday night dance shows that Kun met his false god again, slinky and slick, staring at him from across the drink-sticky club floor. Even when Ten pressed against him, his back to Kun’s chest, Kun knew that he had to go speak with the stranger. “I’ll be right back,” he murmured in Ten’s ear, nipping at one of the dots of silver that adorned it. He peeled away, immediately filling with regret.

Across the club, he elbowed past by a sweating, heaving throng. Kun met his maker with his head held high. “I never thought I’d see you again,” he told the man, who only cocked a scarred brow. “I know how to break the curse.”

“Do you?” asked the stranger, too even by far. Kun’s nape prickled with uneasiness. “A shame. I thought you would find excitement in having the power to make gold out of things you didn’t like. But I suppose that’s what happens when you fall into bed with another god.”

“Another god?” Kun blinked, looked over his shoulder, tried to find Ten among the masses only to note that he was no longer there.

When he turned back, his own god was gone, the image of his red, red hair the only part of him to linger in Kun’s mind.

At the bar, Ten was drinking, shots bought for him by someone else if the gentle waggling of a bottle down the way was any indication. Kun gripped him hard by the shoulder, spun him round and brought them face to face. “Are you a _god_?” he demanded. 

Ten stared at him with eyes so wide, so guileless that Kun would have believed anything he said.

“I am,” he said softly. “I am a god.”

Staggered, Kun took a seat in one of the bar seats. Ten offered him a shot. “For your pain,” he said softly. Kun took it as it was meant to be taken, let the fire cleanse him of the gold that thrummed in his veins, inside to out. “I’m sorry. I would have told you, but it just… you were so angry. I didn’t want to make you more angry.”

He tipped his head up to meet Ten’s eye. He spoke carefully. “How could I ever be angry with you?” he asked, reaching up to cup the curve of Ten’s jaw in his gloved palm.

When Ten bowed to kiss him, it was with the reverence Kun had been trying to capture this entire time. Though it was not their first kiss, it was the first one in which Kun felt as if they were finally equals. Ironic, considering, he thought as he swiped at the bow of Ten’s top lip with the tip of his tongue.

“You know I care about you,” Ten said softly, his voice disappearing beneath the heavy bass boom of the club around them, suddenly cast in sharp relief.

Kun nodded, lips parted, still slick with the kiss bestowed upon him. He said nothing. What could be said to a god that meant anything, that they had not yet heard? So instead he kissed Ten again, hands at either side of his neck, drawing him in closer.

///

They sat in the backseat of the car, hands entwined, headed out to the country. “I want to show you something,” Ten had said, all mystery as he’d watched the scenery fade out from cityscape to trees and fields through the window. “When we’re at your house, I mean. Do you have anything you’ve turned?”

Kun thought of the butterfly, the way in which he’d cradled it to his chest when he’d brought it inside, crying for a self that had never had the chance to live before becoming stuck this way. It still sat on his coffee table, its broken wing laying beside it. “I have something,” he confirmed. “You don’t have to do this.”

Ten squeezed Kun’s hand tightly, the sound of leather creaking beneath his hand filling the space between them. “Let me help you,” he implored, and he was so gentle that Kun could not consider denying him. They rode the west of the way in quiet, listening to talk radio their driver played through the speakers, knowing that there was something to look forward to, for both of them.

In the foyer of Kun’s small home, they lingered, unsure as they toed out of their shoes, Kun’s throat dry with anxiety. Perhaps this was some sort of joke, that they would not be able to undo whatever wickedness Kun had wrought upon the world.

But then they made their slow way to Kun’s couch, and Ten picked up the butterfly, held it between careful fingers. “It wouldn’t do me much good to bring it back,” he said, giving Kun a significant look, “since it wouldn’t be able to fly.”

“You can’t heal it?” asked Kun, the words barely more than a breath. 

“No,” Ten admitted. “But I want to show you it’s possible.”

Ten closed his eyes, spread out his palm beneath the butterfly, and Kun watched with marvelling eyes as the gilded wings slowly turned back into something more earthly. Its single wing flapped uselessly, and it turned onto its side, writhing.

Kun burst into tears at the sight of the pathetic insect trying to take flight when it never would, and he had never seen himself in the world like this. He rested his head on Ten’s shoulder. Ten carded his fingers through Kun’s hair with such care -- and how had he known that this was exactly what Kun needed? He felt...seen. Known. Loved.

“I’ll never be able to take the gloves off again,” he pointed out, when the quiet had settled over them once more in the absence of his crying.

“You never do with people you don’t know,” said Ten, nose buried in Kun’s hair. “But that’s okay. You don’t have to worry about me, at the very least.”

How could that be true? he wondered, the words not quite setting in. Trembling, Kun peeled off a glove, pressed his palm to the curve of Ten’s cheek.

He did not turn.

Kun could only leave his hand there, thumb over the hollow beneath Ten’s eye, draw him down into a misty-eyed kiss.

///

Within two weeks, Kun was back at work. His coworkers threw him a little party, champagne and hors d’oeuvres. He stared up at the marvel that was the plane, once nothing more than a paperweight for a god’s contracts.

Ten had fixed this, too, though Kun had never once asked it of him. He had never asked almost anything of Ten, now that he thought of it.

But now, he prayed that the ruin he had brought would be reversed. Ten would do it for him, as soon as he asked, as soon as neither of them were busy.

Upon his reinstatement, Kun was called up to the big boss’ office, the winding way all too familiar for him. It was nearly Pavlovian the way he responded to seeing every place he and Ten had kissed, the way his mouth hung open when he looked at the water cooler they’d nearly knocked over in their haste to get one another out of their clothes.

On the desk of his superior, the nameplate that read his years of service was turned to gold. Kun beamed down at his reflection shown him in the three plus decades waved in his face. “I don’t know how you did it,” said the big boss, distractedly filing through important documents that needed his signature, “but you did. Thank you for taking all that time off. We’ll be glad to have you back, without compensation, but you seem like a smart young man, managing your savings well--”

“Ah, about that, sir,” and Kun grinned up at the company president, now, mischief to match a certain someone’s, “I actually would like to hand in my resignation, if that’s okay.”

The big boss gaped at him. “What?” he asked, stumbling even over the simple sentiment. “Why would you want to do something like that?”

“I’ve got a full-time job, now,” Kun explained, hands seated neatly in his lap. “I’m actually going to get the opportunity to pursue travel, if you can believe it.”

“Well,” harrumphed his boss, “it seems you’re a very fortunate young man.”

And Kun, for all the world, felt like he was.

///

It was his first time speaking at a medical conference. Kun had always been told he’d have the grace for public speaking, but he never thought he’d get the chance to pursue it. Dr. Moon, however, had been quite convincing, explaining in great detail the benefit of telling his story and the process of his recovery in front of a room of occult and curse experts. The good that could be done unto others was far more than Kun could account for.

It was for this reason that he let Ten hold his face, kiss him for confidence. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll be right there with you.” His hand dropped, just the one, took Kun’s in his own. “Keep praying, would you?” he added, interrupting Kun’s train of thought. “It helps me stay strong for you.”

Kun rolled his eyes, cracked a fond grin. “Do you ever stop?”

Ten dotted a kiss to the apple of Kun’s cheek. “Of course not. By the way, I submitted your notes to the doctor. I thought it would be helpful if he knew what you were going to say, since he’s the one introducing you.”

The hush over the crowd became something a little profound. “I was fortunate enough to meet someone cursed by this particular god,” Dr. Moon was saying, somewhere out beyond the velvet curtain. “He has agreed to share some of his experience over the last six months under my care with you all today.”

Under his breath, Kun uttered a little prayer, grinning to himself, for all the world a fool to be beheld.

This was it. A hush settled over the ballroom they’d be occupying. Kun took a deep breath. He stepped out from behind the curtain just as Dr. Moon finished speaking, met with professional applause.

In the crowd, Kun spotted Johnny, clinging tight to Jungwoo, three glasses of champagne too deep. Kun grinned in his friends’ direction, pleased to have made such an extravagant apology. Johnny flashed him a thumbs up. Jungwoo tipped his glass of champagne, hooted with slightly tipsy delight despite everyone else’s stiff welcome.

At the back of the room stood Kun’s red-haired god, beaming, just before vanishing into a crowd of suit-jacketed doctors crowding in to hear about all the things he could do.

Kun adjusted the podium’s microphone, and began to tell his story.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](http://twitter.com/appiarian)   
>  [cc](http://curiouscat.me/chahakyeon)


End file.
